Voluntaryism
is a philosophy that
opposes anything that it sees as unjustifiably invasive and
coercive. Voluntaryism
regards government as
coercive, and calls for its abolishment, but, unlike a number of
other anarchist
philosophies, it supports strong property
rights which it regards as a natural law
that is compatible with non-coercion. The goal of voluntaryism is
the world-wide replacement of government with the voluntaryist
system, where according to voluntaryists, peoples' actions, whether
they affect themselves, others, or future generations, should be
dictated purely by their own free will, and
association among people should only be by mutual consent. Voluntaryists believe
voluntaryism itself should be the means to achieve this goal,
rather than forceful action.

Overview

The moral justification for
voluntaryism is based both on consequentialism and
a priori
reasoning. Voluntaryism does not argue for the specific form that
voluntary arrangements will take, only that force be abandoned so
that individuals in society may flourish. Since voluntaryists hold
that the means must be consistent with the end, the goal of a
purely voluntary society must be sought voluntarily. Voluntaryists
believe that people cannot be coerced into freedom. Voluntaryists
advocate the use of the free market,
education, persuasion, and non-violent resistance as the primary
ways to change people's ideas about the state and their behavior toward
it. Voluntaryists insist that since all tyranny and governments are grounded
upon popular acceptance, wholly voluntary means are sufficient and,
in fact, the only way to attain a voluntaryist society.

A typical argument for voluntaryism is grounded
on two axioms. First, the self-ownership
axiom holds that each person is and ought to be in control of his
or her own mind, body, and soul. Second, the homesteading
axiom holds that each person by the application of his or her own
labor to un-owned
resources thereby becomes its rightful and legitimate owner.

Voluntaryists begin with the assumption that
human action represents behavior aiming at an improvement over the
current state of affairs (from the individual actor's point of
view). Therefore, voluntaryists reason, every market
transaction is intended to be (and normally achieves) an
improvement in satisfaction and benefits both parties to the
exchange. Thus, both parties to a trade improve their state of
affairs. Voluntaryists argue that on the free and unhampered market
this occurs millions of times each day, the cumulative effect being
the prosperity and high standard
of living that people experience in a free marketeconomy.
From a voluntaryist perspective, government intervention and
central planning (based on compulsion) can only force some people
to do what they would otherwise not choose to do, and thereby
lessens their satisfaction and impedes economic progress.

Voluntaryists also argue that although certain
goods and services are necessary to human survival, it is not
necessary that they be provided by the government. Voluntaryists
oppose the state because, in their view, it uses coercive means in
the collection of revenues and in outlawing would-be service
providers, and they deny that any form of coercion is compatible
with voluntaryism. According to voluntaryists, the coercionist
always proposes to compel people to do something they ordinarily
wouldn't do, usually by passing laws or electing people to office.
These laws and officials ultimately depend upon physical violence
for enforcement. Voluntaryism does not require of people that they
violently overthrow the government or use the electoral process to
change it; it merely requires that they cease to support their
government and obey its orders, whereupon voluntaryists expect that
it will collapse by itself.

Voluntaryism and Anarchism

Libertarian
theory, relying upon the self-ownership
and homesteading
axioms, condemns all invasive acts and rejects the initiation of
violence. Anarchists, in particular, assert that the state acts
aggressively when it engages in taxation and coercively
monopolizes the provision of certain public
services such as the roads, courts, police, and armed forces.
It is this anarchist outlook that the state is inherently and
necessarily an invasive institution - which distinguishes the
anarchist from other libertarians.

By this definition, voluntaryists are peaceful
anarchists. Many late 20th and early 21st Century voluntaryists
based their thinking upon the ideas of Murray
Rothbard and Robert
LeFevre, who rejected the concept of "limited" government.
Rothbard maintained, first, that every government "presumes to
establish a compulsory monopoly of defense (police and courts)
service over some geographical area. So that individual property
owners who prefer to subscribe to another defense company within
that area are not allowed to do so"; and, second, that every
government obtains its income by stealing, euphemistically labeled
"taxation." "All governments, however limited they may be
otherwise, commit at least these two fundamental crimes against
liberty and property." [1]

What especially distinguishes voluntaryists from
other free-marketanarchists is their
stance on strategy, especially their reliance on nonviolence and
non-electoral means to achieve an anarchist society. Like many
European and
American
anarchists during the 19th and 20th Centuries, voluntaryists shun
involvement with electoral
politics. Rejection of the political means is based on the
premise that governments depend on the cooperation of those they
rule. Etienne
de la Boetie, a mid-16th Century Frenchman, who was the first
to make this voluntaryist point, called for peaceful
non-cooperation and non-violent resistance to the state. Despite
the advocacy of violence by a number of anarchists throughout
history, most anarchists have sought to persuade people, rather
than coerce them. Le Boetie's call for peaceful resistance has been
echoed by contemporary anarchists, as well as by a significant
number of those who have been described as near-anarchist in their
thinking, such as Thoreau, Tolstoy, and Gandhi.

Origins

Voluntaryism has a long and rich historical
tradition in the English-speaking world. Its heritage can be traced
at least as far back as the Leveller movement of mid-17th Century
England. The Levellers can be best identified by their spokesmen
John Lilburne (?1614-1657) and Richard Overton (?1600-?1660s) who
"clashed with the Presbyterian puritans, who wanted to preserve a
state-church with coercive powers and to deny liberty of worship to
the puritan sects." [2]

The Levellers were nonconformist religious types
who agitated for the separation of church and state. During the
late 16th and 17th Centuries, the church covenant was a common
means of organizing the radical religious sects. The church to
their way of thinking was a voluntary association of equals. To
both the Levellers and later thinkers this furnished a powerful
theoretical and practical model for the civil state. If it was
proper for their church congregations to be based on consent, then
it was proper to apply the same principle of consent to its secular
counterpart. For example, the Leveller 'large' Petition of 1647
contained a proposal "that tythes and all other inforced
maintenances, may be for ever abolished, and nothing in place
thereof imposed, but that all Ministers may be payd only by those
who voluntarily choose them, and contract with them for their
labours." [3] One only need substitute "taxes" for "tythes" and
"government officials" for "Ministers" to see how close the
Levellers were to the idea of a voluntary state.

The Levellers also held tenaciously to the idea
of self-proprietorship. As Richard Overton wrote: "No man hath
power over my rights and liberties, and I over no mans [sic]." [4]
They realized that it was impossible to assert one's private right
of judgment in religious matters (what we would call today, liberty
of conscience) without upholding the same right for everyone else,
even the unregenerate. The existence of a State church in England
has caused continuous friction since the time of the Levellers
because there were always those conscientious objectors who either
opposed its religious doctrine and/or their forced contributions
towards its support.

Voluntaryists also became involved in another
controversy in England, from about the mid-1840s to the mid-1860s.
In 1843, Parliament considered legislation which would require
part-time compulsory attendance at school of those children working
in factories. The effective control over these schools was to be
placed in the hands of the established Church of England, and the
schools were to be supported largely from funds raised out of local
taxation. Nonconformists, mostly Baptists and Congregationalists,
became alarmed. They had been under the ban of the law for more
than a century. At one time or another they could not be married in
their own churches, were compelled to pay church rates against
their will, and had to teach their children underground for fear of
arrest. They became known as voluntaryists because they
consistently rejected all state aid and interference in education,
just as they rejected the state in the religious sphere of their
lives. Three of the most notable voluntaryists included the young
Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), who published his first series of
articles "The Proper Sphere of Government," beginning in 1842;
Edward Baines, Jr., (1800-1890) editor and proprietor of the LEEDS
MERCURY; and Edward Miall (1809-1881), Congregationalist minister,
and founder-editor of THE NONCONFORMIST (1841), who wrote VIEWS OF
THE VOLUNTARY PRINCIPLE (1845).

The educational voluntaryists wanted free trade
in education, just as they supported free trade in corn or cotton.
Their concern "for liberty can scarcely be exaggerated." They
believed that "government would employ education for its own ends"
(teaching habits of obedience and indoctrination), and that
government-controlled schools would ultimately teach children to
rely on the State for all things. Baines, for example, noted that
"[w]e cannot violate the principles of liberty in regard to
education without furnishing at once a precedent and inducement to
violate them in regard to other matters." Baines conceded that the
then current system of education (both private and charitable) had
deficiencies, but he argued that freedom should not be abridged on
that account. Should freedom of the press be compromised because we
have bad newspapers? "I maintain that Liberty is the chief cause of
excellence; but it would cease to be Liberty if you proscribed
everything inferior." [5]

Although educational voluntaryism failed to stop
the movement for compulsory schools in England, voluntaryism as a
political creed was revived during the 1880s by another Englishman,
Auberon
Herbert (1838-1906). Herbert served a two-year term in the
House of Commons, but after meeting Herbert Spencer in 1874,
decided not to run for re-election. He wrote "State Education: A
Help or Hindrance?" in 1880, and began using the word
"voluntaryist" to label his advocacy of "voluntary" taxation. He
began publishing his journal, THE FREE LIFE (Organ of Voluntary
Taxation and the Voluntary State) in 1890. Herbert was not a pure
voluntaryist because, although he held that it was possible for
state revenues to be generated by offering competitive services on
the free market, he continued to advocate a single monopolistic
state for every given geographic territory, Some of his essays are
titled "The Principles of Voluntaryism and Free Life" (1897), and
"A Plea for Voluntaryism," (posthumously, 1908).

Earlier and Contemporary Usage in America

Although there was never an explicit
"voluntaryist" movement in America till the late 20th Century,
earlier Americans did agitate for the disestablishment of
government-supported churches in several of the original thirteen
states. These conscientious objectors believed mere birth in a
given geographic area did not mean that one consented to membership
or automatically wished to support a state church. Their objection
to taxation in support
of the church was two-fold: taxation not only gave the state some
right of control over the church; it also represented a way of
coercing the non-member or the unbeliever into supporting the
church. In New England,
where both Massachusetts and Connecticut started out with state
churches, many people believed that they needed to pay a tax for
the general support of religion - for the same reasons they paid
taxes to maintain the roads and the courts. It was simply
inconceivable to many of them that society could long exist without
state support of religion. Practically no one considered the idea
that although governmentally-supplied goods and services (such as
roads, or schools, or churches) might be essential to human
welfare, it was not necessary that they be provided by the
government.

There were at least two well-known Americans who
espoused voluntaryist causes during the mid-19th Century. Henry
David Thoreau's (1817-1862) first brush with the law in his
home state of Massachusetts came in 1838, when he turned
twenty-one. The State demanded that he pay the one dollar
ministerial tax, in support of a clergyman, "whose preaching my
father attended but never I myself." [6] When Thoreau refused to
pay the tax, it was probably paid by one of his aunts. In order to
avoid the ministerial tax in the future, Thoreau had to sign an
affidavit attesting he was not a member of the church.

Thoreau's overnight imprisonment for his failure
to pay another municipal tax, the poll tax, to the town of Concord
was recorded in his essay, "Resistance to Civil Government," first
published in 1849. It is often referred to as "On the Duty of Civil
Disobedience," because in it he concluded that government was
dependent on the cooperation of its citizens. While he was not a
thoroughly consistent voluntaryist, he did write that he wished
never to "rely on the protection of the state," and that he refused
to tender it his allegiance so long as it supported slavery. He
distinguished himself from "those who call[ed] themselves
no-government men": "I ask for, not at once no government, but at
once a better government," conveniently overlooking the fact that
improving an institution does not change its essential (allegedly
coercive) nature. Despite this, Thoreau opened his essay by stating
his belief that "That government is best which governs not at all,"
a point which all voluntaryists heartily embrace. [7]

One of those "no-government men" was William
Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879), famous abolitionist and publisher
of THE LIBERATOR. Nearly all abolitionists identified with the
self-ownership
principle, that each person - as an individual - owned and should
control his or her own mind and body free of outside coercive
interference. The abolitionist called for the immediate and
unconditional cessation of slavery because they saw slavery as
man-stealing in its most direct and worst form. Slavery reflected
the theft of a person's self-ownership rights. The slave was a
chattel with no rights
of its own. The abolitionists realized that each human being,
without exception, was naturally invested with sovereignty over him
or her self and that no one could exercise forcible control over
another without breaching the self-ownership principle. Garrison,
too, was not a pure voluntaryist for he supported the federal
government's war against the States from 1861 to 1865.

Probably the most consistent voluntaryist of that
era was Charles Lane
(1800-1870). He was friendly with Amos Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, and Thoreau. Between January and June 1843 a series of
nine letters he penned were published in such abolitionist’s papers
as THE LIBERATOR and THE HERALD OF FREEDOM. The title under which
they were published was "A Voluntary Political Government," and in
them Lane described the state in terms of institutionalized
violence and referred to its "club law, its mere brigand right of a
strong arm, [supported] by guns and bayonets." He saw the coercive
state on par with "forced" Christianity. "Everyone can see that the
church is wrong when it comes to men with the [B]ible in one hand,
and the sword in the other." "Is it not equally diabolical for the
state to do so?" Lane believed that governmental rule was only
tolerated by public opinion because the fact was not yet recognized
that all the true purposes of the state could be carried out on the
voluntary principle, just as churches could be sustained
voluntarily. Reliance on the voluntary principle could only come
about through "kind, orderly, and moral means" that were consistent
with the totally voluntary society he was advocating. "Let us have
a voluntary State as well as a voluntary Church, and we may
possibly then have some claim to the appeallation of free men."
[8]

Late 20th and early 21st Century libertarians readily draw a
parallel between the disestablishment of state
churches and the abandonment of the state itself. Although the
label "voluntaryist" practically died out after the death of
Auberon
Herbert, its use was renewed in late 1982, when George Smith,
Wendy McElroy, and Carl Watner
began publishing The Voluntaryist. George Smith suggested use of
the term to identify those libertarians who believed that political
action and political parties (especially the Libertarian Party)
were antithetical to their ideas. In their "Statement of Purpose"
in NEITHER BULLETS NOR BALLOTS: Essays on Voluntaryism (1983),
Watner, Smith, and McElroy explained that voluntaryists were
advocates of non-political strategies to achieve a free society.
They rejected electoral politics "in theory and practice as
incompatible with libertarian goals," and argued that political
methods invariably strengthen the legitimacy of coercive
governments. In concluding their "Statement of Purpose" they wrote:
"Voluntaryists seek instead to delegitimize the State through
education, and we advocate the withdrawal of the cooperation and
tacit consent on which state power ultimately depends."

THE VOLUNTARYIST newsletter, which began
publication in late 1982, is one of the longest-lived libertarian
publications in the world. Edited and published by Carl Watner
since 1986, the most significant articles from the first 100 issues
were anthologized in book-length form and published as I MUST SPEAK
OUT: The Best of THE VOLUNTARYIST 1982-1999 (Carl Watner, ed., San
Francisco: Fox & Wilkes, 1999). Another voluntaryist anthology
made a case for non-voting: Carl Watner with Wendy McElroy (eds.),
DISSENTING ELECTORATE: Those Who Refuse to Vote and the Legitimacy
of Their Opposition (Jefferson: McFarland and Company, 2001). The
masthead of THE VOLUNTARYIST, perhaps, best epitomizes the
voluntaryist outlook: "If one takes care of the means, the end will
take care of itself." This statement penned by Gandhi urges that
the world can only be changed one person at a time, and then, only
if that person wills it, making it appealing to many voluntaryists.
The only thing that the individual can do, voluntaryists hold, "is
present society with 'one improved unit'." Albert Jay Nock
expressed this point as follows: "[A]ges of experience testify that
the only way society can be improved is by the individualist method
..., that is, the method of each 'one' doing his very best to
improve 'one.'" Voluntaryists believe that this is the quiet,
peaceful, patient way of changing society because it concentrates
on bettering the character of men and women as individuals. The
voluntaryist hope is that as the individual units change, the
improvement of society will take care of itself. In other words,
"if one take care of the means, the end will take care of itself."
[9]

Voluntaryist response to objections

Voluntaryists address objections to their
doctrine by examining them from both the moral and practical viewpoint. From the
moral side, they ask whose property is involved, whether
anyone's consent has been obtained and whether any property being
used against the owner's will. From the practical side, they ask
how would the situation is handled in a statist society, how is it
being handled in present, and how it might be addressed in the
absence of government intervention. Voluntaryists also believe that
some social ills cannot be eradicated from society. Nonetheless
they believe that organizing society along voluntaryist principles
is likely to lead to a higher aggregate utility, and be more
consistent with commonly accepted ethical norms than other,
government-based paradigms.

Voluntaryists claim that normally the most moral
behavior achieves the most practical results. In certain emergency
or "life boat" situations, they acknowledge that there may be a
tension between what appears to be the moral and the practical. In
such cases, some voluntaryists may choose to act contrary to their
principles, while others may remain true to them and suffer the
consequences. However, in both cases voluntaryists continue to
uphold self-ownership, homesteading, and non-aggression as the
basis of their doctrine, and "that human freedom is a higher moral
objective than the arbitrary fulfillment of certain people's needs
and desires." [10]

The plight of the poor in a voluntaryist world

The plight of the poor in a voluntaryist society
is one of the major objections to voluntaryism. The voluntaryist
standpoint is that the poor do not have the automatic right to
receive help and financial support from society, because that would
would violate the homesteading
axiom. Voluntaryists argue that people do not have the moral
obligation to help others, and that strict justice consists in not
acting invasively. Instead, they believe that the poor should be
cared for only by those who voluntarily choose to do so.

The Moral Perspective

Voluntaryists assert that nature is niggardly and
that some goods and
services of value are scarce. To illustrate this,
they like to use the example of how a person cares for herself if
she is left alone on an island. Voluntaryists emphasize that humans
only survive by using their mind and body to provide themselves
with food, shelter, and clothing. The presence of other people
makes the division
of labor and specialization in production possible, but it does
not essentially change the nature of the world, except through
technological
progress, turning some previously scarce goods into free
goods.

In the context of society, justice is a negative
duty for the voluntaryist. It consists in respecting other
people's bodies and property, and in doing them no physical harm.
For the voluntaryist, justice does not imply any special obligation
of altruism.
Voluntaryists concede that people may have ethical duties towards helping
others since they also expect help from others based on their
abilities and needs, but
that this do not imply a legal entitlement for help. According to
Lysander Spooner, "Man, no doubt, owes many other ... duties to his
fellow men; such as to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, ... . But
these are simply ... duties, of which each man must be his own
judge, in each particular case, as to whether, and how, and how
far, he can, or will, perform them." [11]

As for considering the justice of forced charity,
Robert Ringer replied, "I do not believe that I or any other person
has the right to force other men to be charitable. In other words,
I am not against charity, but I am against the use of force." [12]
According to voluntaryism, the fact that someone thinks others are
not contributing enough to charity or to the poor is no
justification for forcing them to contribute more. On the
voluntaryist view, if a man has legitimately earned his property,
it is theft to take it from him against his will for any purpose;
and one man's honestly earned wealth is not another man's
entitlement (nor the cause of another's impoverishment).
Voluntaryists argue that although one might not like one person
being rich and another being poor, nobody has the right to take
from one and give to another. It is central to the voluntaryist
perspective that people who think the poor are too poor may devote
more of their own resources and property to them, and may also try
to persuade others to do so. But they object to penalizing a person
because of their refusal to abide by (what some consider) ethical
duties, and to use the plight of the poor as a justification for
transferring property from the rich to the poor, without the
consent of the rich. These tenents are deeply held by almost all
voluntaryists.

The practical perspective in the case of the United
States

Although there has never been a true voluntaryist
society, America from its colonial roots to the early 20th Century
more closely approximated voluntaryist parameters than many other
nations. The voluntaryist asks us to consider what we find
happening in such circumstances.

In early America, private and community care for
the poor often preceded government's assumption of those
responsibilities. If Americans wanted a school, a library, an
orphanage, or a hospital they simply built it for themselves.
Voluntaryists take history to suggest that people living in
free
market economies produce many more goods and services than
their counterparts in a centrally organized economy. Voluntaryists
conclude that the poor there generally have a higher standard of
living than the poor in a collectivist society, which voluntaryists
see as coercive. For voluntaryists, this economic largess is
largely the result of the investment in tools and individual saving
which is promoted by the free market economy.

Voluntaryists stress that not only were there
probably fewer poor in America than in the rest of the Western
World, but those of the lower classes were able to better care for
themselves and their poorer kin. Until the advent of state welfare
in the early 20th Century, mutual aid societies, church and
fraternal organizations flourished. By 1920, about 18 million
Americans belonged to some type of mutual aid society or fraternal
order, which often provided some form of health, disability, and
death benefits to their members. With the advent of the Great
Depression (which voluntaryists assert was caused by government
financial policies), government welfare programs began crowding out
private efforts.

Voluntaryists argue that the private sector in
America has not only proved itself capable of producing and
creating large amounts of wealth, but that it has also demonstrated
its willingness to contribute to community causes and helping the
poor. To voluntaryists, American history is an example of how the
poor fare in a society of a high voluntaryist nature. As James
Bryce wrote in 1888, "In works of active beneficence, no country
has surpassed, perhaps none has equaled the United States."
[13]

Since citizens cooperate with the state, they are consenting to
having a government

Voluntaryists might answer that citizens may obey
their governments, but they are no more consenting to their
'voluntary' enslavement than a victim of a robbery consents to his
victimization. The victim of a robbery 'voluntarily' hands over her
wallet to prevent a worse occurrence (her own death), but her right
of self-ownership is violated. They argue that if governments
eliminated criminal penalties for failure to file and pay taxes,
they would obtain little voluntary support.

Criminals will take over control of society in absence of a
government

In response, the voluntaryist would begin by
arguing that criminals have taken over control of our society, and
that it is only the fact that our criminal governors have so
legitimated themselves in the eyes of most people that they are no
longer considered criminal.

The existence of a peaceful society depends upon
the large majority of people residing therein respecting other
people and rules of co-existence. In the absence of coercive
government to "protect" these peaceful people, voluntaryists
contend, there would be private defense and mutual protection
agencies, voluntarily funded, to protect people from would-be
aggressors. Each patron would contract for the level of protection
he or she desired and could afford. In such a society,
voluntaryists argue that sureties and insurance companies would
probably provide a great deal of protection, since they would have
the most to lose from destruction and theft of property and life;
and hence that sureties or bonding companies would ultimately be
responsible for the good behavior of those they covered.

The funding of roads

Voluntaryists might answer, "Those who use them
and require their existence. Although roads have been a government
monopoly throughout much of history, there is much historical
evidence that roads could built and operated on a for-profit basis.
Government monopolization and control of the roads has led to many
inefficiencies, deaths, and environmental destruction." [14]

Voluntaryists benefit from government services and yet do not
wish to pay for them

Voluntaryist agree that there is no such thing as
a free lunch. However, they are not asking for government services
in the first place. That is because they maintain that governments,
by their coercive provision of certain services, eliminate the
voluntaryist's range of choice among providers. The voluntaryist
grants that he may need to know "what time it is," but he denies
that the government has a right to eliminate all competitors and
force the consumer to purchase from only a government agency.
Voluntaryists might appeal to the following analogy: if a thief
steals your watch, outlaws all other forms of telling time, tells
you the time, and then demands that you pay him for providing you
with this service, would you consider yourself obligated to pay
him? Of course not. Similarly, the voluntaryist holds that the
government should not be providing any services in the first place
(any more than the thief should have stolen your watch or outlawed
would-be competitors). Voluntaryists worrt that when governments
use coercion to enforce their will, many problematic situations
arise. Voluntaryists try to resolve them by abandoning government,
and using private services when available and affordable.

[13] James Bryce, Volume II, THE AMERICAN
COMMONWEALTH (original publication date 1888), New York: G. P.
Putnam's Sons (1959), p. 494. (This is found in the Capricorn Books
edition, edited by Louis M. Hacker in Volume II, Part VI, Chapter
4, "The Influence of Religion," paragraph 15.) Also see Carl
Watner, "The Most Generous Nation on Earth: Voluntaryism and
American Philanthropy," Whole Number 61. THE VOLUNTARYIST (April
1993).

[14] See Gabriel Roth (ed.), STREET SMART:
COMPETITION, ENTREPRENEURSHIP, AND THE FUTURE OF ROADS, New
Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2006 on both a discussion of
for-profit roads and government inefficiencies in this area.

General References

Etienne de la Boetie, THE POLITICS OF OBEDIENCE,
New York: Free Life Press (1975) and Montreal: Black Rose Books
(2007).

Brian Doherty, RADICALS FOR CAPITALISM: A
Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement,
New York: Public Affairs (2007).

Murray Rothbard, FOR A NEW LIBERTY, New York: The
Macmillan Company (1973).

Mark Spangler (ed.), CLICHES OF POLITICS,
(Irvington-on-Hudson: Foundation for Economic Education, 1996).
Earlier editions were titled "Cliches of Socialism." This anthology
dispels many of the myths that justify the pleas for political
solutions to our social problems.